Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a positioning apparatus configured to perform a biopsy or therapy support by puncture using needle-shaped equipment.
Description of the Related Art
Demands for low invasion medicine are growing for improvement of quality of life (QOL) of patients in medical science. There have been developed percutaneous puncture therapies, such as a percutaneous puncture ablation therapy and a percutaneous puncture cryotherapy, as low invasion therapies.
However, since a portion which is the puncture target is not directly viewable in the percutaneous puncture therapies, a surgeon has to perform puncture based on medical images such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or computed tomography (CT) or the like. A mechanism configured to assist puncture work such as described in U.S. Patent Pub. No. 2011/0190787 has been proposed as surgery support using medical images such as MRI or CT or the like. According to U.S. Patent Pub. No. 2011/0190787, a marker attached to a device is recognized on a medical image to obtain the posture of the device. Next, based on this posture and the position of the puncture target, the direction of puncture is determined to assist puncture work.
At this time, there is frequently assumed a case where the puncture direction is changed by the surgeon himself/herself in accordance with a scale. However, in the case of a scale for viewing, a visually recognizable scale is in the order of single degrees, and it is difficult to perform positioning with precision higher than that. Also, since it is difficult to add a numeric value to all factors of the scale, the surgeon has to count the number of scale factors at the time of performing positioning, which is a burden on the surgeon. Accordingly, in order to improve puncture accuracy and to reduce the burden on the surgeon, it is desirable to mount a position detector configured to detect not only the scale for viewing but also the position of the mechanism.